‘Mother Perry' has battled segregation, fought for civil rights — and at 98 continues to inspire

"Mother" Annie Mae Perry, attends Triumph Church in Naples on a recent Sunday. "She's an inspiration," said Anthony Denson, current Collier NAACP president, who has known her since he was a grade school student at her daycare center in the 1960s.

Daily News

Editor's Note:This is the first in a continuing series of articles about the NAACP, entitled "Evolution of Equality."

She is a matriarch, an inspiration.

Annie Mae Perry's life spans nearly a century, and her story is intertwined with the stories of this community, black and white, young and old.

For decades, she worked days, picking tomatoes, driving a school bus, fixing food in a school lunchroom and caring for young children at a downtown day care. But it was often the middle of the night when she was needed most.

She is this town's "Mother Perry," a woman with five children of her own whose hands as a midwife helped hundreds of babies into the world. A patchwork of frames on the walls and shelves of her Naples home tell the stories of her life.

Color photos of the five living generations of her family stand next to faded black and white prints of older relatives.

Images of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders hang alongside the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and plaques honoring her support for local causes.

One of the most recent additions is a plaque from the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, honoring her for a lifetime of support.

Just six days after the national NAACP celebrated its 99th birthday, Naples' Mother Perry celebrated her 98th.

Early years

Annie Mae McKinney came into the world on Feb. 18, 1910, in Monticello, a town near the Florida-Georgia border, delivered by her own grandmother, a midwife.

She grew up in the country, sandwiched between two brothers and two sisters and studying at a small, segregated schoolhouse where her father was the teacher.

At 16, she married Willie Lee Perry, a farmer's son she'd grown up with and, before he died in 1999, they would celebrate their 73rd wedding anniversary.

Naples was "just a scrub town" when Mother Perry first set eyes on it in 1947. Where she and Willie Lee settled with their children in Copeland, everything around was swamp and farmland.

While her husband sawed logs at the Lee Tidewater Cypress Camp, Annie Mae started picking tomatoes in the fields for $5 a day. During the day she did any kind of work she could find, but she soon realized her hands were often needed elsewhere: delivering babies.

That midwife grandmother had seen to it that Annie Mae learned how to deliver babies, too. So she delivered babies first in Copeland, and then all over Collier County.

"There wasn't nobody here and it was just a struggle for the women," she said. "No midwife down here, no nurses, no nothing." Ask her how many children she brought into this world, and she will tell you proudly: 514 babies in 25 years. Although some details are hard for her to remember after 98 years of living, that number sticks firmly in her mind.

"I felt just like they was mine," she said, contralto voice deepening with her smile. "Felt just like my children."

On a sunny weekday afternoon, Mother Perry sat in her living room, her spare frame cradled in an easy chair, and talked about Naples, her life and family, and the NAACP. Her daughter, Pearline Dixon, sat nearby, helping her mother remember details, dates and names.

"Everything in it has changed," Mother Perry said. "The white and the colored got mixed and it wasn't like it used to be. It used to be sitting on the seat on the bus and if a white person comes in, black people would have to get up."

Segregated days

Pearline, who was about 13 years old when her family moved to Copeland in 1947, remembered walking with other kids to the school bus stop where they waited in separate shacks, one for each race.

The white bus went to Everglades City School and the black bus went to DuPont School. But after eighth grade, there wasn't a high school out in the Everglades for the black kids to go to.

"When I first thought about (segregation) I wondered why, I couldn't understand it," Pearline said. "It was something hard to understand: how could it be so different, so much different, between people?"

Although she didn't go to school past eighth grade, Mother Perry wanted her children to get a better education than she had. But in the 1940s in Collier County, that was a struggle.

Three of the Perry kids went to live with relatives to finish high school elsewhere. Mother Perry drove the other two 70 miles round-trip from Copeland to Immokalee every weekday, leaving at

6 a.m. so they could catch a bus to go to the closest black school, in Fort Myers.

In those days, a young boy named Thomas Huggins knew Mother Perry as the lady who delivered every one of his friends and nearly every other baby around.

Huggins went to school with the Perry kids at DuPont and remembered how sometimes, the driver of the white bus would drive through the puddles, seeming to deliberately splash muddy water on the black kids.

"I often think about that," he said. "But I'm thankful that God brought us a long way. You know, as the song says, ‘I came a long way baby, but I'm here.' It's been a rough road to travel but it'll get better. It's better than it were." When he was about 18 years old in 1956, Huggins bought a lifetime membership in the NAACP. Years later, after moving to Jacksonville and returning to Naples, he would become Collier County's first NAACP president.

Changes

In 1959, a man named Herbert Cambridge came to Naples with his wife, Alma, and started a high school at the all-black George Washington Carver School in River Park.

"Annie Mae Perry is an icon," said Herbert Cambridge, who was president of the Collier NAACP for nearly a decade. "She was a midwife … and she had desegregated her job for a long time. She delivered white babies by the tubful, and blacks, too."

"And she was a good representative of the (NAACP)," Alma Cambridge said.

Mother Perry helped the Cambridges get involved in Naples' black community, a community their leadership would change dramatically over the next couple of decades.

At that time in the 1960s, people were "living like they were used to living," Pearline said, but they started to become aware that segregation wasn't right.

In 1967 when Collier County schools were desegregated, Pearline's son, Howard, was transferred from Carver to Naples High School, and Pearline, who was still working in the kitchen at Carver, became the only black woman working in the kitchen at East Naples Middle School.

It was 13 years after the NAACP won Brown v. Board of Education and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation was "inherently unequal" and unconstitutional.

After desegregation, Mother Perry worked for seven years as a custodian at Naples High School.

The all-black Carver School in River Park was shut down.

A local chapter is born

As Mother Perry and Pearline discussed the days of segregation and the NAACP, a framed picture of their friends and neighbors, John and Cutee Blackmon, smiled down on them from the living room wall.

The local NAACP was founded in 1975 after the Blackmons' son, Willie Lee, was shot by a police officer during a robbery attempt at Howard Johnson in Naples. The Blackmons called for help investigating their son's death, and those pleas led to the founding of the local NAACP chapter.

The Perrys went to the hospital with the Blackmons the night they found out, Pearline remembered.

"(The NAACP) started good things for the blacks," John Blackmon said. "To get them to know what they stand for ... that you didn't have to be what people say you are." Mother Perry agreed.

"We needed it. There wasn't nothing like it here to bring people together," she said. "... Oh yes, we needed it."

Leaders at work

A few years later, deplorable housing in the heart of Naples became one of the issues the group would tackle, along with the future of the former segregated Carver School site.

"(The NAACP) instilled in us that to help make it better we would have to meet and communicate," Pearline said.

A group of people, including members of the NAACP, formed the Black Betterment Committee to fight for the black community's interests as plans were made.

"We tried to build people up," Mother Perry said, her head nodding and her words measured. "Make them work together."

In 1981, McDonald's Quarters, a group of dilapidated shacks where many people, including Mother Perry, once lived, was closed and burned down.

The George Washington Carver apartments and River Park Community Center stand today on the ground where that segregated school once was.

A room inside the community center — the 250-seat auditorium — is named Perry Hall, in honor of Annie Mae Perry.

Praise

Just one month ago, the Collier NAACP gave Mother Perry a plaque recognizing her for her "life's dedication to the civil rights movement."

"She's an inspiration," said Anthony Denson, current Collier NAACP president, who has known her since he was a student at Fun Time Nursery, the day-care center she directed in the 1960s.

On a recent Sunday morning at Triumph Church in Naples, Mother Perry and Pearline slid into their pew at the front.

The service had already started, but the people in the pews, including Denson, nodded and smiled their way.

Most of those pews were empty, but the songs and spoken words of the seven people who were there filled the room to the rafters with praise.

"Power!" exclaimed the people; "Power," said Mother Perry, head rocking to the beat of the drum.

When they called on her to testify, she stood up and let loose, her slow deep voice rising in a crescendo of praise to God for bringing her to church that day, for the people in the pews and for her life, health and strength.

A few minutes later, Denson stood up to take the offering.

He paused for a minute, and then thanked God for bringing him to church that day, the day Annie Mae Perry was able to come, too.

"We need people like her," he said. "People who stand up for what's right."